


Keep A Steady Wing

by Raiyo



Category: Icarus (Webcomic)
Genre: Contest Fic, Gen, M/M, THIS IS A THING, boys being dorks, who needs physics when you can fly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-23 05:47:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/618769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raiyo/pseuds/Raiyo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>‘Kolya,’ Ptichka says from his perch on top of the refrigerator one morning, when the sky is bright and clear. ‘Kolya, you should let me take you flying.’</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keep A Steady Wing

**Author's Note:**

> finally getting around to posting this here. Written for hospitalvespers Icarus comic contest. Always a pleasure to be in this fandom. Do enjoy~

‘Kolya,’ Ptichka says from his perch on top of the refrigerator one morning, when the sky is bright and clear. ‘Kolya, you should let me take you flying.’

It makes Kolya stop for a moment, hands idling on the book in his hands, full of failed flight notes and sketchy scribbles of gliders, before he leans his head to look up at Ptichka dubiously.

And then, as eloquently as he can, ‘Wha?’

Pitchika shifts in his position to lean upside down over the appliance, hair falling messily beneath him.

‘You would like to, yes? I could take you!’ He says like it’s the best and and most obvious idea in the world.

Except it really isn’t and Kolya can feel the tension mounting in his head, the gap in his tooth, his hands on his book. But then he stops, lets himself relax, the line of his mouth falling just a bit more crooked.

‘With you? Dude, I don’t even have the money to fix one tooth let alone a mouth full of them.’

Ptichka has the decency to look almost affronted. Or at least as much as he can when he’s still half hanging upside down. Kolya wonders if he should laugh.

‘I wouldn’t let you fall!’

Kolya looks him over, brows raised, and walks into the other room. It’s not about the falling, he can do that well enough on his own.

-

Ptichka makes flying look so easy, or so Kolya thinks.

Though it isn’t so much what one would call flying as it is floating, really. Like he has to think to keep his feet on the ground and even then there are other places he could he. Ptichka is awkward and gangly on the ground, and no less so in mid air, but there’s still something entirely natural about it. Like that is where he belongs even more than any place of earth.

It’s silly to be jealous. But he probably always will be.

(Even if always is a silly term and he thinks that if Ptichka can fly, can get away from here, why he doesn’t just move on. People do that in Kolya’s life, for all that he can say he’s lived a long enough to call it always too, and sometimes he gets tired of waiting for it to happen.

Maybe Ptichka will leave one day too. Fly away like the birds Kolya studies in his attempts to emulate. Or a carnival balloon, floating up to the heavens on a whim. Just vanish. Just kill him.

Not that he would. Sometimes Kolya thinks that, for a strange, primitive, possibly-alien birdboy, Ptichka is too nice for his own good. Even if Kolya really doesn’t understand anything at all.

[Maybe by the time he leaves Kolya will be able to fly after him])

-

They’re sitting on the roof now, because the way floors and ceilings have always been limits has changed since Ptichka’s arrival, and Ptichka is drinking maple syrup from the jug and talking to the stars as if they are friends.

He has some weird names for them, all the constellations, the different stars, but Kolya isn’t knowledgeable enough about astronomy to tell which is which. For all he knows those might be there actual names. He says the words the way one might talk of lovers and all at once Kolya feels vaguely uncomfortable.

(He doesn’t know when he actually started being comfortable around Ptichka and that might make him the most uncomfortable of all.)

But then the chatter dies down and Ptichka is looking at him again, eyes large and black and like marbles, and Kolya can’t really look away.

‘Kolya,’ Ptichka says in the silence. ‘Why will you not let me take you flying?’

And there are a hundred things he could say, lies and things he doesn’t mean, but he doesn’t say anything like that. He doesn’t really say anything at all for a long time.

‘You make everything seem way too easy. It’s not fair.’ Kolya mumbles into his jacket, quiet, and slightly angry.

‘But not everything has to be hard!’ Says Ptichka and stands up to face him. ‘It is a good night, for flying.

‘You know, not everything has to be fancy sparkle powers either.’ Kolya grumps. But it is, he thinks, kind of a nice night.

Ptichka reaches out a hand, hot and sticky and thin like a birds claw, and tells him to come.

He’s not sure if he believes him, but sometimes Kolya is stupid enough to grab on.

(I will drop you, Ptichka says, three hundred feet in the air as he just grips Kolya tighter beneath his long fingers.

Koyla laughs.

Falling is flying too.)

-

Kolya has never seen a plane in flight, except in books and old black and white films, but he has always been drawn to them. They are impossible things, magical machines that mimic god and tempt the heavens, but at the very least they are free.

One day, he thinks, he’s going to build one and fly.


End file.
